José Gómez: Super Extra Grande

Along with thousands of liters of mushy organic residue, I fly nearly thirty meters, then fall into the muck filling the naval dry dock. I plummet straight to the bottom, burdened by the leaden weight of my ultraprotective suit.

From down here I watch the tsunami, now conscious again, rising with the majesty of an offended sea deity and swimming nimbly and capably away.

Then the governor’s men rescue me. And I surface with the bracelet in my hand, so that they can all witness my success.

But as soon as I emerge, everyone wrinkles their noses, several of them barely succeed in suppressing their gag reflexes… and Mrs. Tarkon, who has impetuously come running over, anxious, I guess, to put on her beloved bracelet, vomits uncontrollably on the spot.

“Perdón, Boss Sangan,” Narbuk tells me from afar, “pero you smell mucho bad.”

“Narbuk, if eighteen hundred metros of sea leviathan had expelled you de su colon con un…” I begin, but I quickly realize there’s no point in making excuses for myself. This isn’t the best time to be so… pedantic. There’d be no point, and if I turned it into a joke, the pun itself would stink. “Go on, olvídate about it, solamente demand they give us a biological decontamination tent ahora . I don’t even quiero to find out qué this suit smells like en el outside. Supongo que they’ll incinerate it instead of putting it back. Oh, y cuando you ask Gobernador Tarkon to pay us, try de convencerlo he should add algo extra for… what do you piensas, does ‘hazards to psychological health’ suena good?”

If I ever sit down to write my autobiography, it’ll probably start like this:

I was born on a Second Wave colonial world with an unusual origin story. The first settlers there were three thousand descendants of Cubans who left Earth in four homemade spaceships, trying to enter Yumania illegally… But they got lost along the way. They named the place where they landed Coaybay, which in the language of their distant Taíno ancestors meant something like Paradise.

Then I might go on:

I’m an only child, an uncommon status in this era of galactic expansion, now that it is fashionable again for human families to have five offspring or more. I use the name Jan Sangan professionally, but my full name, including both my parent’s surnames in the Cuban style, is Jan Amos Sangan Dongo.

And that’s where the story starts to get messy.

Yes, I know it sounds weird, incongruous, comical, and ridiculous. But it’s my name, the one my parents gave me. And believe it or not, I’m sort of fond of it. I’ve never even thought of changing it to something more epic, more glorious, like Ulysses or Magellan, the way so many other fans of space travel do.

At least it sounds better than names like Yousmany or Yotumeiny that my ancestors once gave. With their obsessive fixation on the letter y .

My mother, Yamila Dongo—who, in spite of her dark skin color, was proud of her remote Italian ancestors (descendants, according to her, of Fabrice del Dongo, the hero of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma ; the fact that he was a fictional character didn’t make a bit of difference to her)—always told me that, even though she and my father had foisted a pair of surnames on me that formed the curious Cuban colloquialism for enormous people, animals, or things, sangandongo , at least they had made up for it by giving me an extremely distinguished first name.

I guess that’s something.

Both she and my father, Matsumoto Sangan (who was born on Amaterasu and of Japanese heritage, like most people in that colony), had doctorates in history and specialized in the history of education. They met in Kalbria, the capital of Antares VI, on the first day of a conference for specialists in their field. It must have been love at first sight, because they said they never left each other’s side and never stopped arguing throughout the conference.

Three months later, when she told him she was pregnant, he got all emotional and proposed that if I was a boy they should name me after the great medieval educator Jan Ámos Komenský, an early leader in the field they both studied and revered.

I don’t even want to think about what they would have called me if I’d been born a girl.

Unfortunately, it seems that apart from having me, giving me my strange Czech name was the only thing my parents ever managed to agree on.

Too much arguing isn’t good for a couple; by the time I was born, they had separated.

They even had radically different research styles. My mother, a real homebody, preferred the slow, sedentary, orderly labor of combing the holonet for documents and references. My father, on the other hand, had an adventurer’s spirit and an unshakable belief in field research. He could easily have passed for Indiana Jones, the famous movie archaeologist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As a child, I spent long, peaceful weeks with my mother on the campus of the University of Coaybay City (an original name for the capital of the planet Coaybay, am I right?) surrounded by bibliographies, lesson plans, and professors so absent-minded they sometimes walked right past me without recognizing me as the son of Dr. Dongo, even though they’d taken their own kids to my birthday party the night before to play galactic explorers with me.

Until Dr. Sangan would make his spectacular entrance. Coated in the dust of twenty different planets, he’d invoke his paternal privileges, beating his breast for not having seen me in three and a half months, and “force” me to go off with him for three or four weeks on some research trip to a recently rediscovered First Wave colonial world that had been forgotten for half a century, where he’d study the curious, chaotic, intuitive teaching methods of the natives.

I say he “forced” me, in quotes, because it was all a carefully staged fiction; if I had so much as hinted to my mother how much I enjoyed those wild expeditions with “that crazy chino ,” as she had taken to calling my father, she would have stopped talking to me forever, if not longer.

Actually, I’ve sometimes wondered whether she knew the real score all along and was just pretending we were pulling the wool over her eyes. She’s nobody’s fool, my dear mother.

But I had so much fun with Dr. Sangan and his evident inability to contact any group, human or not, without generating half a dozen misunderstandings and hilarious situations. Though, staying true to my mother and her arroz con pollo with tostones, I always refused to use his chopsticks and complained that sushi and tempura were raw and inedible.

Such are the hard knocks of growing up with divorced parents. On the other hand, being raised on half-truths and white lies leaves you better prepared for dealing with the double standards that rule this world than the scions of happy families will ever be.

My father isn’t tall—not quite six foot one, which in this well-fed, over-vitaminated era is just under average. My mother barely reaches five foot nine—though as she walks around campus with her rhythmically swinging hips, dazzling smiles, and naturally friendly personality, she outshines students and professors four inches taller and ten years younger.

I surprised them both when my first growth spurt, at the age of eleven, left me six foot five.

Gangling could have been my middle name back then. I didn’t have a hint of body hair yet, but I seemed to be all hands and elbows designed specifically for bumping into things and knocking them over, feet made for treading on nearby toes, and knees meant for getting skinned every couple of minutes and running into every damn table or chair I walked past.